The Hypersexualization of Everything

A long time ago, I made a friend laugh by telling him that Helen Knode had just published a book called The Hypersexualization of Everything -- a joke that will mean nothing to you unless you lived in Los Angeles in the early 1980s and followed her work in the L.A. Weekly. Knode was a good writer, but she was also the sort of person who couldn't jot down a recipe for bean soup without describing the ways she wanted to get laid.

Now I want to write a book with that title, albeit for different reasons.  

The first chapter might focus on the instantly-infamous New Yorker cover featuring Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie cuddling on the couch while watching (on a weirdly antiquated TV set) coverage of the Supreme Court's gay rights decisions. At first glance, I thought the image was funny. But this Slate article by June Thomas articulates one good reason to find the picture unsettling.

That reason has nothing to do with homophobia, although a few knee-jerk dunderheads will probably insist otherwise. Rather, the problem is this:

You see, Bert and Ernie aren’t lovers. Back in 2007, the president of the Children’s Television Workshop said that they “do not exist beneath the waist.” Then, two years ago, the Children’s Television Workshop declared:

Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.

That’s not the only lesson Bert and Ernie have to impart. You see, straight America, there’s a difference between same-sex friends and gay lovers. Does America contain households in which lovers pass themselves off as best pals? No doubt. And as prejudice against gays and lesbians fades, more of these ambiguously gay couples will declare themselves. But that doesn’t mean that every pair of cohabiting friends is madly making out on a nightly basis.

Bert and Ernie clearly love each other. But does Ernie suck Bert’s cock? I don't think so.

I am reminded of my great problem with the BBC's Sherlock series, set in the modern era. In a running gag, Holmes and Watson can't go out for dinner together without everyone presuming that they are on a date. By contrast, in the original Conan Doyle stories, the two men had the freedom to dine at fine restaurants, to attend concerts and to visit the theater. It was possible, then, for two people of the same sex to spend time together without wagging tongues or knowing winks or damnable presumptions.

We have not made cultural progress since the Victorian era. In fact, things are much worse.

And the shift has occurred within my lifetime. When I told a college buddy that joke about Helen Knode, we were hanging out at a coffee shop -- probably New York George's (a cheap eatery with a big Scientologist clientele, but that's another story). Back then, two guys could grab burgers at a joint like that and no-one would see anything other than two guys having burgers.

Not so now. Go to any restaurant during dinner time: How often you see two guys at a table without a third? The sight is rare. And yet that sight used to be much more common: Ask anyone my age or older. These days, I simply would have no idea how to ask another man out for a bite to eat without sounding like I'm inviting him on a gay date.

I have not had a male friend in twenty years.

Don't get me wrong: The company of women is very pleasant. But the occasional conversation with another male might be a nice change.

Gay readers, that's your cue to howl a predictable howl: "But what does it matter if people think you're gay?" I'll tell you why it matters: It matters because truth matters. It matters because we are social creatures, because we cannot insulate ourselves from the views of others, and because one of the worst punishments this culture has ever inflicted upon itself is the Hypersexualization of Everything.

The Hypersexualization of Everything means that two individuals cannot talk to each other for any length of time free of the presumption that one party is sizing the other up for a fuck. As a result, the Hypersexualization of Everything condemns us all to loneliness. According to the strictures set by the Hypersexualization of Everything, you get twenty minutes max with another person. Anything beyond that means you're boinking.

The presumption that two guys having burgers must be gay is but one example of how the Loneliness Machine operates. Consider the case of an adult my age interacting with a child.

That last sentence made you feel a sudden sharp sting of ickiness, right? You have just experienced an example of what I'm talking about. That sting you felt is the Hypersexualization of Everything doing its dirty work on your psyche. 

I never had children. Sometimes I wish I had. Most adults have the "mentor" instinct, a desire to pass on wisdom about history, technology, the way the world works. Hell, sometimes a guy just wants to toss a baseball back and forth with a ten year old. But opportunities to play that role are limited, more limited now than ever before. The Hypersexualization of Everything means that all such interactions can't last more than ten minutes, unless both adult and child belong to the same traditional nuclear family.

Back in my thirties, I ran into a few older women (and by "older," I mean by a couple of decades) who had fascinating things to say. Could I befriend them? Could I hang out with them just for the sake of spending time together? No. And you know damned well why.

Now I cannot talk to a woman appreciably younger than me without feeling like a dirty old man. We cannot spend time together even if we have things in common -- and even if, honest to God, we just want to talk.

The Hypersexualization of Everything is the most inhumane and brutal social mechanism ever devised. It reduces our circles of permissible dialogue partners to ever-tinier loops. It renders us lonelier and lonelier and lonelier and lonelier.

Although we were told that gay liberation would free straights from having to conform to stereotyped "macho" behavior, those stereotypes have, in fact, grown far more inflexible and absurd during my lifetime. (Look at nearly any movie from the 1970s and you'll see what I mean.) Although we were told that a more permissive discussion of sexuality would make communication easier, in fact this "open" culture has tossed us all into individual prison cells -- cells which seem to shrink a bit every year.

Thanks to the Hypersexualization of Everything, it has become almost impossible to compose a sentence in the English language that cannot be twisted into a double-entendre. Our entire media infrastructure communicates in an endless series of sniggers. Family Guy has taught us that the only permissible joke is the fuck joke.

As June Thomas noted above, even Bert and Ernie cannot spend time together without the presumption that they suck each other's little felt cocks.

In the 19th century, the Irish proudly said that a young woman could travel alone from one end of the country to another without fear of violation. Irish culture, inculcated with the despised values of The One Religion That Everyone Everywhere Must Always Hate Hate Hate, taught young males that accosting a lady was unmanly. That was the word used. It's in Joyce.

Do you honestly believe that the Hypersexualization of Everything has made us more free?

Can you honestly say that people are less lonely now than they were before the sexual revolution?

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Debt slavery

Here's a guest post from a certain lady toward whom I bear a certain fondness. She's concerned (and by "concerned," I mean infuriated) by the strong possibility that Congress will soon allow the interest on student loans to double.

All the words below the asterisks are hers.

* * *

From the Desk of Ms. Vandal:

It is not often I use Joseph’s blog to voice my own opinions and concerns, but today I am dealing with a problem facing so many students graduating college.

Before I went back to school, I worked as a Data Analyst for a subsidiary of the Boeing Commercial Air Group. As often is the case in the aerospace industry, one day I received a beautiful pink slip. Instead of weathering out the storm in an industry hostile to those without a degree, I decided to go to back to school and get that degree.

With the best of intentions, I started at a community college. I waded the tumultuous waters of placement exams and prerequisites, and built up credits to transfer to a university. I did well. I was graduated with honors. And while the degree came from a school you may not have heard of -- the University of California at Riverside -- it is a prestigious sister school to UCLA.

But when I left college, I faced a much tougher job market. Now I work at a children’s museum. It's a great job, but it pays only $7.50 an hour. I am not full time, nor do I have benefits. Although I have often applied for better-paying positions, the competition is horrifying. At this rate, I cannot afford to pay back my student loans -- hell, I can barely afford food.

And now they want to DOUBLE the interest rate of my loan?

I called the phone number on the Move On infographic posted to the right of these words. They connected me to my local congressional representative. I relayed my story to a staffer, and informed her that doubling the interest rate would put me even further behind on my payments. I wept. She grumpily replied: “I’ll pass the message on.”

I doubt that she will. Nevertheless, I'm glad that I called -- and I hope you will do so as well.

Now we have just one day to get the message out. We have to tell Congress not to double the interest rate on student loans.

Raising the rate is not a move that will help the economy. This lines the pockets of the banks who took on the loans. Those banks are the reason we are in our current financial debacle. Go after the banks! They received billions in bailout money because they were too big to fail. But who cares about me if I fail?

Not the bank. Not the government.

Student loan debt is over a trillion dollars. How will doubling the interest rate help these people pay their student loans? This move will only increase defaults, forcing hardworking people to live with a stigma that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

This fight is not just about the student loan interest rate. This is also about raising the minimum wage. Paying working people better will give them a greater pool of money to bolster the local economy. They will be able to afford groceries, to attend movies, to go to museums, and to have the occasional dinner out. And they will also have a much easier time making their student loan payments.

Correction: The original version of this post accidentally said "Student loan default is over a trillion dollars." The default rate is between 9 and 10 percent.

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The messenger, and how to shoot him

If you haven't read it yet, check out Glenn Greenwald's latest column, in which he discusses the smear tactics used against him in retaliation for his groundbreaking work on the NSA scandal. Apparently, certain pseudo-journalists (actually toadies for the spooks) have been scouring through old legal cases in which Greenwald participated, looking for anything -- anything -- that might be twisted against him.

It gets worse:

Just today, a New York Times reporter emailed me to ask about the IRS back payments. And the reporter from the Daily News sent another email asking about a student loan judgment which was in default over a decade ago and is now covered by a payment plan agreement.

You get the picture.

Y'know what this situation reminds me of? The Gary Webb story.

Webb was the journalist for the San-Jose Mercury-News who dared to write about CIA involvement in the drug trade. The Los Angeles Times (generally considered a liberal-ish paper) came down on him like the proverbial ton of bricks. Pressure was brought to bear on the SJMN, and Webb found himself re-assigned to a crappy beat, which he covered until the writer was "axed" to resign. He eventually committed suicide. Later, both the CIA's own Inspector General and the L.A. Times itself admitted that Webb got it right.

These words from Webb may give us a foretaste of what Greenwald can expect:

"The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post," he said. "They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as the New York Times saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA."

One of the great virtues of Jim DiEugenio's Destiny Betrayed, the work advertised in the upper right-hand corner of this blog, is the book's detailed investigation of the press crusade mounted against New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison. While a mere "conspiracy theorist" might posit those attacks to be the work of the FBI or CIA, DiEugenio offers iron-clad, courtroom-quality proof that many of those "journalists" were, in fact, working for the government.

As Garrison himself once said, "You just don't dance with the CIA."

So expect to hear more about every stain in every pair of soiled underwear that ever rested in Glenn Greenwald's top dresser drawer. These attacks will prove useful to spook-watchers: They will allow us to compile a list of those reporters who work for The Man.

More insidious -- and harder for outsiders to prove -- will be the pressure brought to bear on Greenwald's employers. That, I predict, will come next.

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Old soldiers never die. They just...listen in.

Marcy Wheeler has made an interesting observation. General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, recently gave a little speech to those who work under him. 

Together with your colleagues in US Cyber Command, you embody the true meaning of noble intent through your national service. In a 1962 speech to the Corps of Cadets on "duty, honor and country," one of this nation's military heroes, General Douglas MacArthur, said these words teach us "not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm." You have done all that and more. "Duty, Honor, Country" could easily be your motto, for you live these words every day.

I'd feel better if Alexander had quoted someone other than the guy who was fired by President Truman for insubordination. MacArthur thought that he, not the President, had the right to make foreign policy and to take actions which might well have led to a Third World War. As Truman explained:

If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military. Policies are to be made by the elected political officials, not by generals or admirals. Yet time and again General MacArthur had shown that he was unwilling to accept the policies of the administration. By his repeated public statements he was not only confusing our allies as to the true course of our policies but, in fact, was also setting his policy against the President's...

Keep that statement in mind as you recall what another NSA whistleblower, Russell Tice, told us a few days ago...

And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on.

Now here’s the big one. I haven’t given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now.

Do you think that General Alexander was trying to send a signal by quoting MacArthur?

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Arianna, your roots are showing

In a comment, a reader asked why Huffington Post has changed its look. Being a rare visitor to that site, I didn't know about any changes. So I popped on over and discovered another reason to distrust Arianna:

Hello from 8,000 feet. I'm in Aspen, where the conversation, thankfully, is much thicker than the air. I'm here for the inaugural 21st Century National Service Summit, sponsored by the Franklin Project, a new venture of the Aspen Institute. For two days, speakers will be discussing all the ways in which we can scale the idea of giving back into a robust program of national service. The goal is to make universal national service a new American rite of passage by creating one million national service positions for those aged 18 to 28.

If she's for universal national service, there must be something wrong with the idea. What you should focus on here is the fact that Arianna Huffington -- a one-time Republican firebrand who tried to Lady MacBeth her way into the White House -- claims to be a progressive convert. Yet here she is, leading a panel at the Aspen Fucking Institute.

Remember Scooter Libby's coded message to Judy Miller about the Aspen Institute? Here's a list of the Institute's bigwigs. Some of these folks aren't so bad -- Gabby Giffords, Herman Wouk (author of The Caine Mutiny, born in 1915!) -- but there are plenty of "usual suspects": Richard Armitage, David Koch, Henry Kissinger...

You know. The gang.

According to this rather funky source, the Board of trustees also includes this country's most powerful backers of Israel, including "Frederic Malek, major Republican financier and member of the board of the America-Israel Friendship League." This is the same Malek who helped Nixon's "pogrom" against Jews in government. Malek later became an advisor to Sarah Palin.

The basic point is this: Don't trust Arianna. Don't trust any courtier to the Dodekatheon who floats down from Olympus to tell the common folk which rites of passage they should observe. Or, to switch metaphors, the author of a book called Pigs at the Trough shouldn't pal around with pigs.

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The Supreme Court embraces the "voter fraud" myth

While it's useful to see the Supreme Court's heinous decision in terms of America's history of racial discrimination, it is even more useful to see it in terms of the GOP's ongoing efforts to use the "voter fraud" myth as a means of suppressing the Democratic vote.

Who loses today? Not just the tens of millions of minority voters whose ability to cast a ballot now may be more easily restricted by new voting laws. Not just the millions who now will be more vulnerable to redistricting plans that are patently discriminatory. But the poor, the elderly, and the ill of all races, men and women who have voted lawfully for years but who will not be able to find the money to pay for new identification cards, or take the time out of work to travel to state offices to get one, or have the health to make the journey to obtain identification they otherwise do not need. These people, everywhere, were the indirect beneficiaries of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. And today their right to vote is far less secure.*

So the losers today are registered voters like Craig Debose, a Vietnam veteran and longtime resident of South Carolina. Last year, he traveled 11 hours by train to Washington to testify in a Section 5 lawsuit. He doesn't have a car, which is why he didn't have photo identification, which is why he was going to be disenfranchised by state lawmakers until the Voting Rights Act saved him (for at least the last election cycle, the South Carolina law is still on the books). Losing today, too, is Jacqueline Kane, an elderly woman in Pennsylvania who had voted lawfully without incident for decades but who would have been forced from her nursing home to get an identification card. All to prevent "voter fraud" no one can prove.

Voter ID laws will now immediately go into effect in Texas, which -- as you may not know -- has been inching away from the red zone. I would go so far as to say that immediate impetus for this decision may have been a desire to keep Texas out of the blue.

The Court's decision gives the "go" signal to racially biased gerrymandering. Not long ago, there was an attempt in one Texas county to place all the Latino voters in one district in order to dilute their strength in neighboring districts. Expect to see much of that sort of trickery.

Here are my three main takeaways from this rotten decision:

1. Those purer-than-pure lefties who claim to see no difference between the parties are fools. (This blog seems to attract more than its share of people who think this way.) If no substantive difference exists, then the voting suppression tactics discussed above would serve no purpose, and the Justices who voted for today's decision would not all have been chosen by Republican presidents.

2. The GOP is doubling down on the Nixonian Southern strategy. I both agree and disagree with Joshua Green of Bloomberg:

On its face, this looks like a big victory for Republicans. But is it really? I suspect it will turn out to be a poisoned chalice. Many of the GOP’s current problems stem from the fact that it is overly beholden to its white, Southern base at a time when the country is rapidly becoming more racially diverse. In order to expand its base of power beyond the House of Representatives, the GOP needs to expand its appeal to minority voters. As the ongoing battle over immigration reform demonstrates, that process is going poorly and looks like it will be very difficult.

I agree that this decision will serve to prolong the GOP's image as the party of racism. I disagree with the "poisoned chalice" remark. Both the party and the nation will acclimate itself to this toxin.

The Republicans have been pushing the "voter fraud" myth very hard since at least 2004. They would not propagate the fable if they did not have polls and other data telling them that voter ID laws work to their advantage.

3. The ultimate targets of the disenfranchisement movement are not blacks and Latinos but the homeless, the jobless and the disaffected. Even desperate people who find lodgings with relatives may suddenly find themselves unable to pay student loans or the IRS. Such people probably number in the millions. They will not want to divulge their addresses to the compilers of any official database, which is precisely what voter ID laws demand.

The modern economy is creating a growing lumpenproletariat. Even people with jobs -- even college teachers -- now find themselves living in cars, shelters and public parks. Another economic shock could cause the number of desperately poor people to skyrocket. Voter ID laws will grant these economic victims no way to exact political punishment on the corrupt officeholders who ruined their lives.

Barred from the voting booth, the very poor will have no outlet but rebellion. And as you know, there are plans in place for that contingency as well. A big part of that planning is the development of non-lethal weaponry. An even bigger part is our hideously oppressive domestic surveillance infrastructure.

Which once again brings us, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to Ed Snowden and Environs...

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Marian: "You speak treason!" Robin: "Fluently."

Most of you came here to read about Snowden, who has been targeted by one of the more effective smear jobs in American media history. What amuses me most of all is that the smear articles veer between "Snowden revealed nothing new" and "By revealing the NSA's secrets, Snowden is a traitor." You can't have it both ways.

The only piece you really need is John Cassidy's "Demonizing Edward Snowden" in The New Yorker:

But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public. The puzzle is why so many media commentators continue to toe the official line. About the best explanation I’ve seen came from Josh Marshall, the founder of T.P.M., who has been one of Snowden’s critics. In a post that followed the first wave of stories, Marshall wrote, “At the end of the day, for all its faults, the U.S. military is the armed force of a political community I identify with and a government I support. I’m not a bystander to it. I’m implicated in what it does and I feel I have a responsibility and a right to a say, albeit just a minuscule one, in what it does.”

In other words, Josh reflexively identifies with Prince John and Sir Guy, not with Robin and Will Scarlet. But according to the myth, it was Robin who stood for rightful rule against the forces of usurpation, and it was Robin who always had the support of the common people. Marshall must know this, because his terminology -- "I'm implicated in it" -- indicates guilt, not pride.

(Incidentally, the NSA, FBI and CIA are supposed to be civilian agencies, not military.)

Although my views may shift as more facts come out -- after all, when dealing with spooks, one never quite knows who is who -- right now, I'm rooting for Ed Snowden. And I don't feel "implicated." I feel proud.

Josh's comment seems more profound the more I ponder it. At what point do you stop kissing the boot poised to smash your face?

Added note: Did you know that in the movie (for guys of my generation, there is only one Robin Hood movie), Olivia de Havilland rides the same Palomino later purchased by Roy Rogers and re-christened Trigger? At the time, the horse was called Golden Cloud.

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Spook

Of course, I use that word in that same sense I would also apply it to his mother.

(By the way, it's not as easy as you may think to do that Shepard Fairey stuff -- not if you want to do it right. That's a painting, not a filtered photo.)

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The REAL story

Although I haven't much time to write, I must register an ongoing disgust with this kind of tripe. It's as though everyone in the media has been given orders to demonize Ed Snowden, while doing everything possible to distract us from the things he has said.

Most of our pseudo-journalists have decided that Snowden is a bad guy because he didn't work within the system. They refuse to recognize that those NSA whistleblowers who did go that route found themselves on the receiving end of more sheer shit than any human being should ever have to deal with. How can you ask someone to work within the system when he is trying to warn you that the system has become a nightmare?

Here's the real story, folks: It just doesn't matter whether or not the NSA minimizes information on American citizens. The big secret our news media won't tell you is that our intelligence apparat works hand in glove with the UK's. Their version of the NSA is called GCHQ. Just as we have no laws against spying on Brits, they have no laws against spying on Americans. They have their Prism and we have ours.

GCHQ routinely shares information on American citizens with the CIA, NSA and FBI. Routinely. Automatically.

So who's kidding whom?

The link above goes to Craig Murray's column. These quotes deserve study, not skimming:

I am astonished that still none of our pusillanimous media has published the simple fact that NSA and GCHQ share ALL intelligence reports with each other. Every member of the House of Commons who has ever been in the most junior ministerial position knows this – that amounts to hundreds. So do at least fifty thousand current or retired civil service and military personnel. So do the majority of senior journalists.

“Once such data is in the hands of the US authorities, there is no clear legal framework that prevents it from being shared with UK authorities. The Security Service Act 1989 and the Intelligence Services Act 1994 place MI5, MI6 and GCHQ on a statutory basis, and permit those bodies to receive any information from foreign agencies in the ‘proper discharge’ of their statutory functions.

“Under that broad principle, UK agencies may receive and examine data from the US about UK citizens without having to comply with any of the legal requirements they would have to meet if the same agencies had tried to gather that information themselves.”

In fact GCHQ do not have to ask, and NSA do not have specifically to initiate. US citizens are included in the UK Prism operation, and UK citizens are included in the US Prism operation, and the swapping of resulting intelligence reports is an automatic process. So the UK takes the view it is not breaching the guidelines about spying on its own citizens as it is not REQUESTING the NSA to do anything, and vice versa.

One of Murray's readers seems to have a background in British intelligence. His words have the ring of truth:

It is not exaggerated in the least. GHCQ and MI6 share all intelligence reports, and so do MI6 and the CIA. I saw such reports every day of my working life for 20 years, so I can assure you I perfectly well know of what I speak.

When you receive the reports, signal intelligence (SIGINT) from GCHQ and NSA is covered in a blue jacket, human intelligence (HUMINT) from MI6 and CIA is in a red jacket. The only way you can tell US from UK intelligence is by the numeric code indicator at the start of the report. The format is precisely the same.

This has been going on quite a while, of course. The following comes from David Leigh's excellent 1988 book The Wilson Plot:

In 1947, the highly classified UKUSA treaty arranged by Atlee and Bevin re-launched a worldwide signals intelligence collection system. Britain and the U.S. would pool everything between them, both the work and the Intelligence 'product'. Australia, Canada and later New Zealand would join in, but with less access.

The 1947 agreement was all about cables, not telephone calls; nevertheless, that's when the great "intel swap" system began. When are our journalists going to wipe that brown off their noses and start telling us what's really going on?

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Endgame: The death of Michael Hastings

A couple of posts down, I showed you video of a DARPA expert explaining one way to engineer an automotive accident like that which took the life of journalist Michael Hastings. Beyond that, I've avoided writing anything about him that might carry that familiar conspiratorial reek, since all of those recent NSA pieces have probably left many of you feeling reeked out.

But now...

Well, let's just say that things have happened, and I don't see how we can avoid this mysterious morass any longer. So once more into the reek, dear friends...

From Business Insider:

About 15 hours before dying in a fiery car crash at about 4:30 a.m. in L.A. on June 17, journalist Michael Hastings sent an email to several colleagues that said the FBI was investigating him and he was "onto a big story."

The subject line of the email, obtained by Los Angeles news station KTLA, was "FBI investigation, re: NSA."

Here's the full text:

Hey [words blurred out] — the Feds are interviewing my "close friends and associates." Perhaps if the authorities arrive "BuzzFeed GQ", er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.

Also: I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the [radar] for a bit.

All the best, and hope to see you all soon.

Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, who met Hastings when he was embedded in Biggs' unit in Afghanistan, described the email as "very panicked."

"It alarmed me very much," Biggs told KTLA. "I just said it doesn’t seem like him. I don’t know, I just had this gut feeling and it just really bothered me."

It's not clear what "big story" Hastings was referring to in his email, but he reportedly had been talking to his boss, BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith, about a story on Barrett Brown.

Brown, a journalist affiliated with the amorphous hacker collective Anonymous, was arrested for threatening an FBI officer and sharing a link to stolen credit card information taken from Stratfor. The 31-year-old, who faces up to 100 years in prison, is in jail awaiting a September trial.

The LA Times notes that Hastings was also researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Defense Department and the FBI.

And the subject line mentions the NSA, which has been in the news all month.

That gives us three possibilities (Brown, the NSA and Kelley), although the three may not be mutually exclusive.

It occurs to me that Hastings is precisely the kind of journalist that Ed Snowden might have contacted. Hastings and Greenwald may not have been as close as peas in a pod, but they were certainly peas of adjacent pods. We should note that Greenwald has written in defense of Barrett Brown.

The "Young Turks" segment above shows Hastings expressing his concerns about the surveillance state. At the end of the clip, Hastings reveals that people in the special forces community told him that he himself had long been the subject of surveillance.

Barrett Brown and Hastings were quite close, as this piece by Brown -- published in Vanity Fair three years ago -- testifies. Like Hastings, Brown (author of Flock of Dodos) has focused his investigative efforts on this country's increasingly oppressive cyber-surveillance systems.

For a good look at Brown's legal troubles, see the Greenwald piece above and this profile by Patrick Mcguire. Mcguire is especially good:

It’s obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown’s blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn’t the credit card information that motivated him. When those five million emails leaked, a product called TrapWire, which was created by a company called Abraxas, was revealed to the public at large. And it caused a media shitstorm. In 2005, the founder of Abraxas and former head of the CIA’s European division, Richard Helms, described TrapWire as software that is installed inside of surveillance camera systems that is, “more accurate than facial recognition” with the ability to “draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” As Russia Today reported, one of the leaked emails, allegedly written by Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, stated that TrapWire was at “high-value targets” in “the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC.”

Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation. If you click through and take a look, you can see that Richard Helms’s name is right there on the top of the first page.

Helms, of course, was the quasi-legendary former CIA Director who played important -- and sadly under-recognized -- roles in MKULTRA, Watergate, and the Iranian hostage crisis. One of these days, if you promise to behave, I'll tell you a fun story about Helms and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Right now, though, let's bring it all home -- and by "home," I mean this very blog:

Alongside Abraxas and Cubic on those tax filings is another company called Ntrepid. According to Florida State’s records of corporations, Richard Helms is the director of that company. In 2011, Barrett’s work helped lead the Guardian to their report that Ntrepid won a $2.76 million-dollar contract from Centcom (U.S. Central Command), to create “online persona management” software, also known as “sockpuppetry.” To break it down in plain English, online persona management was created to populate social networks with a bunch of fake and believable social media personas to “influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.”

Oh ho.

We saw a lot of sock puppetry (in these pages and on many other websites) throughout 2008. We also saw a fair amount of the stuff during the Weiner scandal. Hell, I suspect that much of the Breitbart empire was built on sockpuppetry. How else can you explain the fact that some Breitbart-related bloggers -- with audiences notably smaller than that of a C-list blog like Cannonfire -- can nevertheless attract dozens or hundreds of comments on any given post?

Sockpuppets are important. They can help drive the national conversation. They can make a fast-spreading rumor seem to have the solidity of fact. They can transform a not-terribly-popular view -- or presidential candidate -- into the mainstream choice. And if you insist on saying things that the Powers That Be don't want you to say (such as "Hillary for President in 2008!"), sockpuppets will work tirelessly to make your life miserable. They will do their damnedest to drive you off the internet.

Incidentally, many of the responses to my piece on Progressive Insurance's "Snapshot" device have been obvious examples of sockpuppetry in action. See for yourself.

Brown also wrote about another Ntrepid product called Tartan, designed to uncover the true identity of anyone who posts online under an assumed name. Call it the anti-whistleblower app.

If you're an Occupy Wall Street admirer, you'll appreciate another service provided by Tartan:

In another document on Ntrepid letterhead, titled “Tartan Influence Model: Anarchist Groups,” Tartan is positioned as a software tool that can help combat domestic protestors who operate in “an amorphous network of anarchist and protest groups” and suggests that these groups are prone to violence. They name Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. as part of the problem, and have “built Occupy networks through online communication with anarchists.” By identifying the threat of anarchistic, supposedly violent protestors, Tartan sells its services by saying their software “identifies the hidden relationships among organizers of seemingly unrelated movements… To mitigate the ability of anarchists to incite violence… Law enforcement must identify the complex network of relationships among anarchist leaders.” So, beyond taking apart movements that exist solely online, Tartan is looking to come out and crush real world protest movements as well.

Besides a few journalists, not many people have been looking into this information. The one other group that does is called Telecomix, the guys who are famous for supplying dial-up internet lines to areas of the world with oppressive dictatorships, and who I interviewed about the Gaza conflict here. They operate the Bluecabinet Wiki, and they worked very closely with Barrett Brown to uncover more information about the network of cybersecurity firms.

I talked to one of the volunteers at Telecomix, who strongly believes in the work that Barrett did to connect all of these very confusing dots: “I haven't seen reporters really taking a hard look at what Barrett Brown, the investigative journalist, was researching and where it leads to. His discovery that TrapWire = Abraxas and that there is CIA involvement is very important. Do you know in Berlin right now a game was started to destroy surveillance cameras in public places? Barrett apparently was reading through the emails of HBGary and Stratfor, linking the data to the specific surveillance companies and contractors… It is an extremely time consuming task.”

Some of you will recall Brown's involvement with the HBGary hack, as summarized in The Nation:

In February 2011, a year after Brown penned his defense of Anonymous, and against the background of its actions during the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr, CEO of the private intelligence company HBGary, claimed to have identified the leadership of the hacktivist collective. (In fact, he only had screen names of a few members).

I should interrupt here to note that alleged computer security "genius" Aaron Barr seems to be an incredible blowhard. In previous posts, we noted that his much-touted background information on fellow blogger Brad Friedman was hilariously, ludicrously wrong. Barr also sold an ultra-expensive anti-virus system to big corporations, even though his own company relied on AVG, which is free.

(Rich people often don't feel comfortable with a purchase unless they overpay. That mentality has transformed the art market into what it is today.)

HBGary is now run by a "former" CIA guy named Dean May. That has been the case ever since the company was purchased by ManTech, which has ties to Mitchell Wade, best known for his part in the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal. (You may recall Cunningham's letter from prison, which spoke of Wade as though he were Darth Vader.)

Let's get back to McGuire's piece:

Barr’s boasting provoked a brutal hack of HBGary by a related group called Internet Feds (it would soon change its name to “LulzSec”). Splashy enough to attract the attention of The Colbert Report, the hack defaced and destroyed servers and websites belonging to HBGary. Some 70,000 company e-mails were downloaded and posted online. As a final insult to injury, even the contents of Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely wiped.

The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”

Although I remain a (cautious) supporter of Ed Snowden, one can't help but wonder if the recent Snowden controversy has any relationship to this alleged plan to lure Greenwald into a disinfo trap. We shall see.

Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management” system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain policies.

Once again, we see the importance of sockpuppetry.

The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He created a wiki page, called it ProjectPM, and invited other investigative journalists to join in. Under Brown’s leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections between the US government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and information security consultants.

And now we come to Endgame:

Brown began looking into Endgame Systems, an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about staying in the shadows. “Please let HBGary know we don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” one leaked e-mail read. One of its products, available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to “zero-day exploits”—security vulnerabilities unknown to software companies—for computer systems all over the world. Business Week published a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that “Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.” For Brown, this raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

For more on Endgame, see this piece in Defense News:

Endgame Systems is a secretive cyber company with an intriguing specialty. The firm’s chief product, software called Bonesaw, is a “cyber targeting application” that tracks servers and routers worldwide, mapping the hardware attached to the Web.

These are the access points through which the National Security Agency, Cyber Command and other U.S. agencies, could launch operations against adversaries and threats.

The head of Endgame is a young fellow named Nathaniel Fick, whose service as a Marine in Iraq was dramatized in the HBO series Generation Kill. Fick seems to be one of those Special Chosen Ones. You know the kind. From an early age, the fates select these rare individuals for great things; before a single grey hair has sprouted on their heads, they get tapped to run intelligence agencies or spy-tech private firms.

We've been seeing a lot of Special Chosen Ones lately.

So that's what Brown was poking into, and that's why the feds got him out of the way by tossing him into the pokey on bullshit charges. It's a pretty fair bet that his buddy Hastings decided to pick up where Brown left off.

That's when he got slammed in the face by the mailed fist of Pure Coincidence.

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Did the NSA spy on Barack Obama?

Here's a follow-up to this morning's post...

Before Ed Snowden, there was NSA whistleblower Russell Tice. We've talked about him a great deal in the past. A reader just turned me on to this interview with the man. If the following doesn't make your jaw drop, it must be wired into place.

Tice: Okay. They went after -- and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things -- they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the -- and judicial. But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms.

They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges.

They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups.

They went after U.S. international -- U.S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business.

They went after NGOs that -- like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups.

So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it...

Interviewer: Now Russ, the targeting of the people that you just mentioned, top military leaders, members of Congress, intelligence community leaders and the -- oh, I’m sorry, it was intelligence committees, let me correct that -- not intelligence community, and then executive branch appointees. This creates the basis, and the potential for massive blackmail.

Tice: Absolutely! And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on.

Now here’s the big one. I haven’t given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now.

So: Are journalists now going to mount an attack-the-messenger campaign against Tice? Mark my words -- that is precisely what will happen if this interview is heard widely enough. Some reporter somewhere will find the guy's old college girlfriend, and she will reveal that Russell Tice used to hide boogers under the sofa and that's why we shouldn't listen to anything said by that awful, awful man. It'll be something like that.

Let's speculate as to what the NSA may have found on Obama. Anyone remember Tony Rezko and his links to Obama? Anyone remember Rezko's links to international crook Nadhmi Auchi? Anyone remember Evelyn Pringle's investigative pieces? Anyone remember that Pringle said that every time corrupt Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich got a pay-off, State Senator Barack Obama got a smaller pay-off (even when the money came from those goombahs in Vegas)?

In a statement on the NSA scandal, Obama made the memorable claim that he himself was a likely target. Now we know what he was getting at.

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"Nobody is listening to your phone calls": Oh REALLY...?

In response to the NSA ruckus, Obama assured the nation: "Nobody is listening to your phone calls." This is true. But a true statement may mislead.

No one can deny that a computer listens to your phone calls -- that's what the Trailblazer Project was all about. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it:

News reports in December 2005 first revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications. Those news reports, combined with a USA Today story in May 2006 and the statements of several members of Congress, revealed that the NSA is also receiving wholesale copies of American's telephone and other communications records.

The NSA believes that they have "listened in" to a conversation only when human ears have heard audio. Obviously, it's physically impossible to listen to all calls (unless the NSA were to hire half the country to eavesdrop on the other half). A computer goes through that material, translates it into written form, and scans for key words.

Technically, Obama told a truth. Not the whole truth.

The NSA is supposed to target only "non-US persons," but the nature of the beast is such that a lot of domestic dialog gets picked up anyways. The rules which allow for the maintenance of those records are more elastic than Santa's waistband:

They show, for example, that N.S.A. officers who intercept an American online or on the phone — say, while monitoring the phone or e-mail of a foreign diplomat or a suspected terrorist — can preserve the recording or transcript if they believe the contents include “foreign intelligence information” or evidence of a possible crime. They can likewise preserve the intercept if it contains information on a “threat of serious harm to life or property” or sheds light on technical issues like encryption or vulnerability to cyberattacks.

"Evidence of a possible crime" is a phrase that can cover a lot of territory.

Even in a private telephone conversation, I'm not the sort of person who is likely to shout "I'm gonna kill that sunvabitch!" But we all have a right to say those words in private without having to worry about whether our NSA overseers will judge that phrase to be a serious threat instead of jolly hyperbole.

Glenn Greenwald's latest revelations make clear that the NSA is in that very business:

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;

• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

"Relevant to cynersecurity"..."usable intelligence"..."threat of harm": I'd say that Uncle has allowed himself enough legal leeway to peek at nearly everything you do and say.
 
As Ed Snowden pointed out in his interview, whatever protections we still have are really a matter of policy, not law. Policies change. Even if you trust Obama, one day you will live under a president you do not trust. That president will enact policies of his own.

Actually, as few now recall, Bush argued that FISA never applied to his administration.

Under Bush, anyone with even mildly left-wing views might find himself on a no-fly list. Peaceful nature conservancy groups were considered eco-terrorists and infiltrated by the FBI. If another Bush gets into power, what kind of protections do you expect to have when speaking privately on your cell phone?

Marcy Wheeler addresses a similar point in The Nation. She notes that our current program replaced an earlier one in 2006...

A 2010 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general (IG) shows that the predecessor program was a mess. The FBI failed to keep adequate records of requests made by the government to phone companies, frequently violating the limits of what they were entitled to take. More troubling still is a tool the FBI implemented, ostensibly for emergency situations, called “exigent letters”: basically a request to phone companies to provide data immediately, with a promise to provide the appropriate legal paperwork—either an NSL or a subpoena—after the fact. Using exigent letters, the FBI obtained records for more than 3,000 phone numbers, often failing to submit the paperwork, or doing so without the appropriate approvals. Requests were often approved by junior staffers, who had no authority to do so.

Moreover, some requests were not tied, as required, to a specific authorized investigation. Significant numbers (perhaps 17 percent, judging from figures in the IG report) were tied not to national security investigations, but to domestic ones. At times, the FBI requested information on phone numbers when no investigation was pending. When accepting information from phone companies, the FBI didn’t always compare its contents with the original request and therefore may have entered unrelated information into FBI databases. In an unknown number of other requests, the FBI submitted no paperwork at all.

In addition, in several cases, the FBI obtained reporters’ phone records by using this method, including the Post’s Ellen Nakashima and the Times’s Jane Perlez.

Is the NSA, in the name of counter-terrorism, creating a new world of political repression? Sure seems like it. As Marcy notes, the protections for whistleblowers are weaker now than was the case in 2006.

In an earlier post, we asked: Why is the NSA collecting "metadata" on our phone calls when the phone companies themselves retain that information for a fairly long period of time? Marcy gives what I believe to be the answer: The government does not want to create a legal paper trail by asking the phone carriers for that information on a case-by-case basis.

Now ask yourself: Why wouldn't the government want to create a checkable record?

Added note: Back in 2007, I pissed off a lot of people with my assertion that many of our problems in this area trace back to the original FISA act of 1978. Six years ago, a major controversy erupted when many liberals (rightly) feared that Bush was gutting FISA protections. When I said that the problem went deeper -- that the act itself was ill-written -- these same liberals foolishly construed my statement to be somehow pro-Bush.

(Not for the first or last time, blinkered partisanship -- what I call "the endless game of shirts-vs.-skins" -- blinded people to a larger issue.)

Y'see, I'm old enough to recall 1978. At that time, quite a few folks on the left side of the aisle voiced worries that the FISA Act allowed the government too much leeway for mischief; even though the tech was more primitive back then, the potential for Big Brother-ish abuse still existed. Such concerns were considered perfectly respectable, and one could give voice to them without injury to one's standing as a liberal.

Twenty-nine years later, in 2007, I was booed off the stage when I said that FISA should be rewritten from the ground up. Perhaps now, in 2013, more people will take my point.

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Sick think and Ed Snowden

A growing number of stories (including a few in this very blog) have questioned the bona fides of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Note, for example, these two Facebook posts by Naomi Wolf:

Some of Snowden’s emphases seem to serve an intelligence/police state objective, rather than to challenge them.

a) He is super-organized, for a whistleblower, in terms of what candidates, the White House, the State Dept. et al call ‘message discipline.’ He insisted on publishing a power point in the newspapers that ran his initial revelations. I gather that he arranged for a talented filmmaker to shoot the Greenwald interview. These two steps — which are evidence of great media training, really ‘PR 101″ — are virtually never done (to my great distress) by other whistleblowers, or by progressive activists involved in breaking news, or by real courageous people who are under stress and getting the word out. They are always done, though, by high-level political surrogates.

What does this argument come to? Simply this: If a whistleblower has his shit together, he is automatically to be considered a suspicious character.

That attitude doesn't quite seem fair, does it?

He keeps saying things like, “If you are a journalist and they think you are the transmission point of this info, they will certainly kill you.” Or: “I fully expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.”

Finally in my experience, real whistleblowers are completely focused on their act of public service and trying to manage the jeopardy to themselves and their loved ones; they don’t tend ever to call attention to their own self-sacrifice.

Catch-22: If he did not note the risks and sacrifices, people would accuse him (have accused him) of being in it for some imagined pay-off. Yet if he does emphasize both the risks and the sacrifices, that fact alone is made to seem suspicious (or solipsistic). It's a no-win situation!

Then there's this offering from old-school conspiracy researcher Dave Emory, who asks many of the same questions I have asked about Snowden's bizarre "fast track" rise within the intelligence world. Perfectly legitimate points, these. But then Emory (who also thinks that Assange is some sort of Nazi) gives us stuff like this:

It turns out that Cit­i­zen Snow­den is a sup­porter of Nazi-linked Ron Paul.
The vast bulk of Paul’s Super PAC money came from ultra-right wing Peter Thiel.

Oh, come off it.

As readers know, I detest Paul. Anti-libertarianism has been a recurrent theme of this blog. (So much so that my brother has advised me to stop bitching about "the librarians.") But Ron Paul exerts an understandable appeal to those who believe in legalizing pot and staying out of foreign entanglements. We can count Bill Maher as a member of this group -- although, ultimately, he made his big donation to Obama instead of Paul.

Many people (particularly the young) have a poor understanding of economics, yet they also possess a keen awareness that the Iraq war was a disaster, and they have a deep suspicion of the national security state. I can understand why these people admire Ron Paul, even though I would strongly advise them to transfer their affections to some other leader -- preferably one who didn't take Atlas Shrugged so fucking seriously.

Accusing all Ron Paul supporters of evil motivations is simply foolish. Hell, it's as foolish as supporting Ron Paul.

The point about Thiel is, of course, well-taken -- but he has nothing to do with Snowden. By way of analogy, one could point out that Barack Obama got a lot (and I mean a lot) of money from Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street banks back in 2008. That fact doesn't permit us to construct absurd scenarios in which all Obama supporters (including the aforementioned Bill Maher and, presumably, Dave Emory and Naomi Wolf) are secretly controlled by Lloyd Blankfein.

Let us continue with the afore-cited piece:

Thiel is one of the asso­ciates of the Koch Brothers-founded Cato Institute.
The leak­ing jour­nal­ist, Glenn Green­wald, is also pro­fes­sion­ally asso­ci­ated with the Cato Institute.
The pos­si­bil­ity that the Cato/Thiel/Paul dynamic may have fac­tored in the devel­op­ment of this story is one to be con­tem­plated and researched.

If you want to know more about the Greenwald/Cato link, go here. To my eyes, the "professional" association does not amount to much. Cato hosted an event for an anti-Bush book written by Greenwald, who also wrote a Cato study on drug decriminalization.

Libertarianism is, at root, an ultra-conservative phenomenon. In previous posts (here and here), I've noted that post-war fascists (unlike their pre-war predecessors) have felt drawn to libertarian economists -- the Pinochet/Milton Friedman "marriage" being the most obvious example. How did this linkage form? I'm not sure, although I suspect that the answer has much to do with the fact that the basic libertarian economic stance comes down to this: "Might makes right! Hail the strong and damn the weak!" That also happens to be a fairly good precis of the fascist weltanschauung.

Yet there are a number of non-economic issues on which libertarians and liberals have agreed. Drug policy is one; neoconservative adventurism is another. That's why, during the Bush years, we frequently saw folks on Democratic Underground citing Justin Raimondo on the Iraq debacle. If Greenwald and Cato have stepped toward each other, they did so only in these areas of overlapping interest.

I would advise Greenwald (if ever he asked for my advice, which he wouldn't) to steer clear of that crowd. That said, if you have any political sophistication at all, you no longer feel deeply surprised every time you see libertarianism create strange bedfellows. Annoyed, perhaps, but not surprised. At any rate, this "strange bedfellows" phenomenon provides an insecure basis for a grand conspiratorial scenario.

Which brings us back to Eddie Snowden.

Right now, I feel both regretful and proud of my previous posts about him. The regret stems from some rather over-the-top reader reactions -- e.g., "Snowden is the CIA equivalent of COINTELPRO." The evidence for such a proposition is thin, although it may thicken in the future. But right now, a lot of people are getting War and Peace out of the Beale ciphers -- in other words, they're reading way too much into way too little.

The Snowden controversy has reminded me of an old bete noir: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence whose overblown fears about Soviet penetration did enormous damage to the Agency. In the past, I've made no secret of my own belief that Angleton masterminded the Kennedy assassination -- a belief that owes much to John Newman's Oswald and the CIA, updated edition.

(We'll soon bring this back to Eddie. Promise.)

I mention Angleton here for one obvious reason: Our larger subject today is paranoia. JJA was the Priest-King of the Paranoid Clan. That's why we older spook-watchers continue to fixate on him: He is a mirror unto our natures. Although we may wish he had never been born, he is, god help us, us.

He may even have helped to create us. James Jesus Angleton played no small role in fomenting criticism of the Warren Commission, even though Angleton also helped the Commission formulate its conclusions. At least two important early critical works -- Inquest by Edward Epstein and Farewell America by "James Hepburn" -- trace back to Angleton and his circle of cronies and admirers.

I'm still not sure why he played both sides in that game. (At any rate, the JFK assassination is really a topic for another time.) But I do know this: Angleton's sad history proves that the dark craft of counterintelligence breeds sick think.

What is "sick think"? The basic idea is easy to grasp: While most people do not hesitate to presume bad motives on the part of those with whom they disagree, a sick-thinker takes matters further. A sick-thinker presumes bad faith on the part of his friends.

Here's how a sick-thinker thinks:

The person who presents himself as an ally is really my foe. He's playing a game of 11-dimensional chess -- and only I, clever I, am clever enough to see him for who he truly is. And only I, clever I, can foil his plan by taking the game into the 12th dimension.

Which again brings us, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to Ed Snowden and Environs. What makes Snowy tick? Any attempt to answer that question forces us to think like a counterintelligence specialist -- like James Jesus Angleton.

Frankly, I don't like what I turn into when I try to play that role. How much of my previous writing about young Edward is valid, and how much is Angletonian sick think? Are people like Naomi Wolf thinking sickly?

Perhaps we would all be better off if we took Eddie at face value. Isn't he the whistleblower we've been hoping for all these years? Now that we have him, must we piss on him? If we piss on him, what message do we send to future potential whistleblowers?

I can't recall any previous story which so quickly became enveloped in a thick cloud of weirdo politics. Many conservatives have labeled Snowden a traitor, yet some conservatives have also welcomed the political damage he could potentially do to Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Obama supporters have become very suspicious of Snowden -- and of Greenwald, normally considered a liberal hero. Those suspicions would not exist if a Republican were in office. On cable TV and throughout much of the internet, the controversy has focused on a whistleblower and a president, when we ought to be talking about the NSA.

Maybe the whole damned culture has come down with a bad case of sick thick.

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World's scariest video

This video is indeed scary, though not in the ghosties-and-gore sense of the term. I'm talkin' paranoia. If you're the sort who gets aroused by fear, these words will leave you quivering with full-body hyper-orgasm.

The above talk comes to us by way of Kathleen Fisher, a computer expert at DARPA. Let me stress: only the first few minutes are scary; the rest is techno-gobbledygook that will interest only a few readers of this blog.

You'll be particularly enchanted by the bit about the mp3 file. "Death by Mahler" wouldn't be such a bad way to go. The opening of the Fifth, perhaps...

While listening to Fisher speak, you may find yourself thinking about the strange case of journalist Michael Hastings, who died in a single-car crash that has yet to be fully explained. However, to suggest a link would be the epitome of irresponsible journalism.

So whatever you do, don't think that way.

Also, some of you may recall an earlier Cannonfire post about a telematics device called Slashdot, provided by the good folks at Progressive Insurance. (I still get hate mail from Progressive on that one.) The lecture embedded above may provide a few clues as to how someone could use Slashdot to perform all sorts of mischief. However, some people would call me a fearmonger if I made such a suggestion.

So whatever you do, don't think that way.

(Thanks to reader Dan for providing the link.)

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Obama arouses Ayres

The far right believes that former Weatherman Bill Ayers is Barack Obama's secret controller in the commie underground. What will they say now that Ayers has denounced Obama and called for the President to be tried for war crimes? Heads will explode!

I imagine that they will presume that Ayers is lying, that this is all some sort of trick. A nonsensical view, that -- but, hey, if it makes 'em happy, so be it.

Last year, Sean Hannity complained that the media had not spent enough time covering Bill Ayers. Right now, Fox may consider giving Ayers a regular gig.

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The weird and wonderful world of Ed Snowden

How do the workaday analysts at CIA -- the desk-jockies who put in ten, twenty, thirty years without any extraordinary advancement or pay raises -- feel about some of the articles appearing in the news lately? These stories indicate that a few select individuals rise within the CIA hierarchy about as quickly as you can sneeze. A few posts down, we mentioned the odd case of Avril Haines, a fairly young woman who recently landed the No. 2 spot at the Agency even though she has no history there. (Or so we are told.)

And then there's Eddie Snowden, NSA whistleblower extraordinaire.

We'll get to his unusual rise in a bit. But first, we should note that he showed up for an online chat, conducted by the Guardian, in which he punctured the myth that the NSA cannot make political use of its eavesdropping capabilities.

More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it’s all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

Snowden later added: "Policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens." Beautifully put! Here's more wisdom from the Snowy one:

NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of "warranted" intercept, it's important to understand the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would consider a "real" warrant like a Police department would have to, the "warrant" is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.

If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

Some suspect that he has become a spy for China. Hell, I've toyed with that idea myself. (And so have you. Admit it, you bastard.) Eddie has this rejoinder:

Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

He also has this observation about the infuriating state of American journalism:

“Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”

Ed Snowden is clearly a bright guy -- and a born writer, if he should choose that profession. But even if we support what he's doing and saying, we must still ask: Who is this young man, and how did he rise so quickly?

Using published sources to solve that problem is no snap. The Guardian interview gives us a couple of further puzzle pieces which serve only to make the puzzle even more puzzling. For example, critics have focused on a discrepancy between his previously-reported income -- $200,000 a year -- and his actual salary for Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden:

The statement I made about earnings was that $200,000 was my "career high" salary. I had to take pay cuts in the course of pursuing specific work. Booz was not the most I've been paid.

Which raises (not "begs" -- I wish everyone would stop using that word) the question: Who paid Eddie $200k?

Elsewhere, we get this:

Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored.

We've been told that, at the time he left the country, Edward Snowden did not work for the NSA but for the intel-linked consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which is largely owned by the semi-notorious Carlyle Group. The Bin Laden family was once heavily invested in Carlyle. In other words, Osama's close kin owned a company so thoroughly intertwined with the NSA that Snowden speaks as though Booz and No Such Agency are one and the same. So, like, suck on that.

(There is some dispute as to whether Carlyle and Saudi Binladen actually parted ways. One could also argue that Carlyle Capital -- a heavy contributor to the mortgage crisis -- did more harm to the world than Osama Bin Laden ever dared to dream. And don't get me started on Carlyle head Frank Carlucci...!)

An earlier post referenced the work of oddball writer Jon Rappoport, who has been styudying what we may call "the Snowden mysteries." Rappoport thinks that Snowden was, is and will remain a CIA operative, and that he was given the job of ratfucking a too-big-for-its-britches NSA. I'm not persuaded by this theory, but I do congratulate Rappoport for asking some of the right questions.

The same questions are now being asked by more mainstream investigators. See, for example, this article, which notes that Snowden was (as mentioned in his interview) a high school dropout.

He dipped in and out of course work over the next dozen years and was eventually certified as a Microsoft Solutions Expert — a gateway to tech jobs. But Snowden felt stuck in those first years of adulthood.

If we accept this chronology, we must conclude that he got his Microsoft certs after he had worked at CIA and NSA. One wonders why a guy making $200k would bother. (As you'll see, a lot of the Snowden story would make more sense if we could add another ten years to his life.) One also wonders why the CIA would entrust its security systems to someone who doesn't have his certs, when so many people who do have them are scrambling for gigs.

This story implies, but does not state, that he got his certs at a much earlier point. The piece also reveals that his online pseudonyms include "Wolfking Awesomefox" and "Chishinken," a name he seems to have used on Ebay. (It's the Japanese word for "barley.") The above-cited article incorrectly states that he became Wolfking in 2010, even though the grand event actually occurred in 2008. He has also used the nicks TheTrueHOOHA and Phish. At one point, he claimed to be a 37 year-old man working for an anime art company located next door to NSA headquarters.

But let's get back to this piece...

In 2004, he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit but less than four months later he was discharged.

Snowden struggled through a period of joblessness, spending long nights playing computer games and chatting online.

It would make more sense for him to seek his Microsoft certs at this time. Here comes the really strange bit...

In 2006, Snowden made a remarkable leap from security guard at the University of Maryland to security clearance. His new position with the CIA put him on the path to extensive travel, a six-figure income and extraordinary access to classified material.

How he managed that jump remains unclear.

I'm reminded of that cute bit in Grindhouse, in which a "missing" reel allows the filmmakers to avoid explaining important plot points.

Here's an odd discrepancy: In an earlier statement, Snowden averred that he had worked for the intelligence community for nearly a decade. 2006 was a little more than six years ago. Is he counting his (abbreviated) period with the Special Forces? Or did he do something more interesting than play video games during the 2004-2006 period?

When he was 20, he wrote in an online forum that employers "fight over me."

“Great minds do not need a university to make them any more credible: they get what they need and quietly blaze their trails into history,” he wrote online at age 20.

I can't help but wonder if Snowden comes from one of those "intelligence families" we occasionally read about. That would certainly go some ways toward explaining his leap-froggery up through the system.

His father, Lon Snowden, recently gave an interview to Fox News, which does not identify his employer; however, this page indicates that a Lon Snowden (probably the same fellow) is a "Retired Military Officer at U.S.Coast Guard" who, oddly enough, got his MBA just last year. Back in 1979, he was graduated with honors from the USCG Aviation Training Center, where he learned about aviation electronics. Lon's wife works for the federal court here in Baltimore.

Maybe some readers will find a way to scry spookiness in this history, but even I am not that paranoid. On the other hand, we have this WP investigation of Ed Snowden's life, which notes that he grew up within spitting distance of the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters...

Employees of the NSA and its corporate partners, dozens of which have offices in surrounding business parks, dominate nearby neighborhoods.

When Joshua Stewart, who grew up near Snowden and now works as a reporter at the Orange County Register in California, started talking to friends about the leaker, “we tried to come up with someone who didn’t have a security connection, and we couldn’t.”

This would indicate that Lon was something more than just an electronic engineer for the Coast Guard.

So we're left trying to figure out why the CIA tossed huge opportunities at "Wolfking Awesomefox" when he was a security guard -- rather than a student -- at the University of Maryland. Sure, Ed is quite intelligent, but there are a lot of bright guys out there, and many of them have degrees.

Mother Jones reveals that Ed worked for a covert NSA facility located within the University. 

On Sunday, the Diamondback, the university's student newspaper, noted: "Which facility and exactly where it was Snowden worked is unknown, but the NSA has connections to several university facilities, including the Laboratory for Physical Sciences, the Office of Technology Commercialization and the Lab for Telecommunication Science." Later, the university confirmed that in 2005 Snowden worked for less than a year as a "security specialist" for the NSA-linked Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), which serves as a research center for the intelligence community.

The research done at CASL ranges from cultural and linguistic studies to work on "spycraft" technology...

Is the "security guard" story starting to fall apart...? Sure seems like it.

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Space

I have a non-political question about science fiction cinema.

There is no up or down in space. Why is it, then, that every space battle involving starships situates those ships on the same plane, as if they were at sea? Whenever the Enterprise faces off against a Klingon ship, both vessels are on the same axis, in terms of top-to-bottom. Yet if such a face-off were to occur in real life, the Klingon ship might be upside-down or at a 90 degree angle, from the Enterprise's point of view.

Can you think of a scene in a major science fiction film which depicts two large spaceships "off-axis"?

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Two questions

1. Dick Cheney -- whose role in the Plame affair has not been forgotten -- says that Ed Snowden is a traitor. In light of this pronouncement, I'd like to ask you good people a poser that has been making the rounds on Facebook:

If Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were both drowning, and you could only save one...what type of sandwich would you like?

2. My Ladyfriend sent me this early campaign sign. What do you think?

My feelings are mixed. As you know, I supported Hillary in 2008. But her stint as Secretary of State has left her reputation somewhat soiled, and I wish she had remained a senator. I had strong disagreements with many aspects of this country's foreign policies throughout the 2008-2012 period -- disagreements about Israel, the war on terror and other matters. Like it or not, she signed her name to those policies.

I know that many of my readers like to credit Hillary with everything that went well on the foreign policy front while blaming Obama for everything that went poorly. To me, that argument reeks of special pleading and wishful thinking.

On the other hand, I will of course support her if she is the nominee in in 2016.

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GAY BDSM PORN AT THE CIA!

(How do you like my headline? I was feeling a little Fox Newsy this morning...)

CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell has left the Agency to spend more time with his family. In other words, he pissed someone off. His replacement is a woman named Avril Haines, who has an unusual background: As recently as 1995, she was a Johns Hopkins dropout who ran a bookstore known for its erotic literature readings. Couples would pay $25 to listen to someone -- presumably Ms. Haines herself -- read Anne Rice's "Beauty" books aloud.

As it happens, while courting my ladyfriend, I used to amuse her by reading the non-gay parts of those books while doing my characteristically superb impersonations of Bullwinkle, Comic Book Guy and Jack Nicholson. (Lately, I've been working on a Jonny Lee Miller.) Too bad I didn't live in Balmer in 1995; I'd have made those bookstore nights quite memorable.

I admire Ms. Haines. She may have been the last person to figure out a way to make money selling books to Baltimorons. Not long ago, I discovered that a thrift store owner in Dum-dalk prices his books at zero, on the theory that "Nobody here reads." In fact, there's a large book depository in the city that gives away its wares. How do they stay in business? Volume, volume, volume!

Semi-seriously: Replacing Mike Morell -- an advocate of torture -- seems like a step in the right direction. Did you know that Morell was the guy who delivered that infamous Presidential Daily Briefing to Bush? Remember that one? The briefing said that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S., and Bush muttered something along the lines of "All right, you've covered your ass."

Funny thing about that document: There were indications that the original version was about ten pages longer. We discussed those indications in this Cannonfire post published way back in 2005. Y'see, we first learned about that briefing paper from a German journalist named Oliver Schroem, who reported in October of 2002 that the thing was nearly twelve pages long. And yet all we ever saw was the first page and a half.

Congressman Tim Roemer later confirmed that the original document was much longer. Dunno about you, but I'm awfully damned curious to know what was in those missing ten pages. Maybe now that he's no long employed by CIA, Morell can address this issue...?

(I know. Fat chance. Still, one can hope.)

So what do we know about Avril Haines, beyond the fact that she found a way make money from gay BDSM porn? Tim Weiner gives us some background...

She has been the White House deputy counsel for national security affairs since 2010; as the National Security Council’s lawyer, she has wrestled with the legal ramifications of drone strikes abroad and intelligence-gathering at home.

"Wrestled with the legal ramifications..." What a cute way of putting it! In other words, Obama was determined to embark on a death-from-above program, and Avril's job was to come up with a way to give the whole thing a veneer of legality.

She was a leading intellectual author of Obama’s May 23 speech at the National Defense University, when he said it was high time for the U.S. to run the Sept. 11 counterattack under the laws of war.

Y'know. Like the drone thing.

If you take a close look at this woman's background, you'll see absolutely nothing that qualifies her for such an august position at CIA. Then again, Poppy Bush had nothing to do with CIA until he was appointed head of the Agency. At least that was the situation on paper; the reality was quite different. Haines must have been approached at some point, probably while at college. Or maybe a man in a black suit showed up at those literary gatherings and scribbled in his notepad: "Haines enjoys reading detailed descriptions of torture: Possible recruitment material...?"

Now that she has Morell's old job, she can fly to one of those secret CIA prisons, change into her black leather boots and fishnets, and implement the nastier bits from those Anne Rice books. But if she really wants to inflict cruel and unusual punishment, she'll force her captives to listen to the poetry of Stanley Rice.

Of course, if word of that practice leaks out, the World Court will finally have to step in.

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